Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday April 29, 2012 @04:53PM
from the check-it-out dept.

MojoKid writes "Today at the GeForce LAN taking place in Shanghai, NVIDIA's CEO Jen Hsun Huang unveiled the company's upcoming dual-GPU powered, flagship graphics card, the GeForce GTX 690. The GeForce GTX 690 will feature a pair of fully-functional GK104 "Kepler" GPUs. If you recall, the GK104 is the chip powering the GeForce GTX 680, which debuted just last month. On the upcoming GeForce GTX 690, each of the GK104 GPUs will also be paired to its own 2GB of memory (4GB total) via a 256-bit interface, resulting in what is essentially GeForce GTX 680 SLI on a single card. The GPUs on the GTX 690 will be linked to each other via a PCI Express 3.0 switch from PLX, with a full 16 lanes of electrical connectivity between each GPU and the PEG slot. Previous dual-GPU powered cards from NVIDIA relied on the company's own NF200, but that chip lacks support for PCI Express 3.0, so NVIDIA opted for a third party solution this time around."

Except Nvidia has had SLI based multi gpu boards since at least the 8000 series, whereas 3dfx hit the limits of their Voodoo architecture, and required external wall power by the time Voodoo5 came out, and for all the extra hassle, you had a card that performed about as well as a GeForce256, but which also took a spot on your power strip. That's why 3dfx died, not because of SLI boards.